Organizations and businesses are often comprised of various operational units having different data storage and reporting requirements. For example, the financial department of a company may need financial reports generated from data stored in one database, while the marketing department may need access to information stored in an entirely separate database. Each database may store data in a different schema or format, and so a single company may use many databases and/or applications, each of which expects data to be stored or organized in a different manner.
Rather than maintaining, at considerable expense and complexity, the hardware and software resources to operate their own set of data management applications, a company may instead choose to make use of one or more cloud-based data management applications. A cloud-based data management application is a data management application that is operated by a different party (termed “the cloud application provider” or “the operator of a cloud-based application”) than the company using the cloud-based application. The company using the cloud-based application may access the cloud-based application over the Internet (colloquially named the “cloud,” hence the origin of the term cloud-based application).